Hello to all. We start by referring to our most recent major event, which is of course, the Clean up the World Campaign. We held an Awareness Event at Casemates the week before the clean up with information stalls about litter issues and impacts and saw much interest from the public as well as from St Mary’s First School and St. Anne’s Middle School. Pupils helped decorate large banners on site with messages about litter and also created some lovely artwork on the environment and how we should be protecting it. Thanks to the teachers who supported the event and to the ESG team who made it possible. We would also like to thank the Youth Service and Dept of Environment for helping with some equipment needed. Special thanks to Ania for her beautiful and eye-catching murals and to Gamma Concepts for the clever use of past Clean up pictures built into a Rock of Gibraltar Mosaic.

The Clean up saw great efforts from volunteers, combined with resources from various bodies and entities throughout Gibraltar, result in a major win for our natural environment that we should all be proud of. A full report on actions taken and feedback from teams will be published and made available to the Ministry for the Environment and Litter Committee. Of course we hope that recurrent hotspots can be eliminated and we shall be striving to achieve that also. But transformations also took place at very awkward spots such as rocky revetments and slopes, hard to access beaches and on underwater dives- all of which have benefitted from this community clean up and thanks go to all who made this possible. That’s close to 30 teams and support from a dozen other entities! A special thanks to the logistics team that put in many hours before the clean up to ensure it all happened as smoothly as possible. Final thanks to the Open Day Trust for their donation, which ensures we can continue updating and replacing essential equipment.

The ESG website will carry footage of all the action and teams on our Flickr site accessible on our home page at esg-gib.net as from next week.

We wanted to promote the Eco Park based at Flint Road, off Devil’s Tower Road, as this facility has been developing and expanding in the last year. Known better as a car scrap yard the site is undergoing a transformation with huge piles of different waste streams prepared for export. You can take all your recyclable waste there – open all week, checking times at 200-75108. Even take your polystyrene, which has only very recently been accepted at the Park for onward recycling!

The ESG now looks ahead to autumn with plans to revise its Wish List and core aims and bring this up to speed. We hope to have this in place by the end of October. Issues of energy, planning and traffic, among several others, will be reviewed and updated. Meanwhile we continue to hold meetings with Government and other bodies following up on a number of pressing environmental matters.

The DPC will meet end of October with potentially a number of large schemes on the agenda. We urge the public to visit egov.gi and then Town Planning to read through live applications that could be included in the next agenda. Of course simply appearing on the Application site does not mean inclusion in the next agenda. That will be confirmed and published a week before the DPC meeting itself. The ESG will also be monitoring particular projects.

Please contact the ESG if you would like any more information. You can track our press statements on our website- and email us at esg@gibtelecom.net . Thank you for listening.